


Anchors

by Stelmarya



Series: Of Supernovas, Black Holes and other singularities [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Pregnancy, Russian Natasha Romanov, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24921778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stelmarya/pseuds/Stelmarya
Summary: Love is no cure for trauma, she knows that now, and the demons inside her head apparently have found the best opportunity to haunt her. A pregnant Natasha fights against her memories, living in a body she no longer recognizes, clinging to things that can't ground her anymore. There is an abyss of difference betweenchoosingandbeing forced to, after all.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Laura Barton (mentioned), Natasha Romanov/Tony Stark
Series: Of Supernovas, Black Holes and other singularities [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1690888
Comments: 6
Kudos: 44





	Anchors

**Author's Note:**

> Body dysphoria + deep-rooted trauma + unhealthy thinking + pregnancy = this weird fic.
> 
> For those who haven't watched Agent Carter, it's stated that they used to handcuff the girls in the Black Widow program when they went to sleep, or at least that generation of girls.

**ANCHORS**

.

( _lila; before_ )

“Come here.” She doesn’t move, keeps her arms strictly against her body. “Come, it’s okay.”

The bundle in his arms coos, protesting slightly as Clint adjusts her carefully, and she has to physically hold herself from running away.

“It’s fine, Nat. I promise you.”

It isn’t _fine_. She shouldn’t be there, she shouldn’t be so close to something so delicate, so fragile.

“Don’t make me stand up and drag you here, kid.”

She approaches them grudgingly, averting her eyes to the wooden roof of his cabin. She can’t believe Laura really gave birth in this dump; the things that woman had to endure for Clint…

“She doesn’t bite, see?”

“I _know_ she doesn’t bite.”

Not even her sharp tone can wipe the smile off his face; he’s radiant, more alive than she’s ever seen him, and she wants to retreat immediately, leave him and his _bundle of happiness_ to enjoy themselves without her. She only glances at the baby once, grimacing at her swollen, purple face and blind eyes. Babies aren’t really pretty like the movies show; they looked as if someone had smashed them against a wall.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

She nods silently, shifting her weight on her legs. She has never seen such a small kid; there’s nothing really interesting about them, and many empty phrases flash in her mind. She doesn’t need to be anyone in particular with Clint, he told her so, but this is an out of the ordinary situation.

This is the first time he has let her meet one of his children, after all.

“Hello, Lila,” he murmurs, rocking her gently. “Look, Auntie Nat is here.”

_Auntie Nat?_

“She’s a bit scary, but deep inside she’s a marshmallow, I promise.”

Natasha bristles, crossing her arms with a huff. She doesn’t know what he is thinking, letting her get so close to his precious child; he has always been too trusting for his own good.

“Can I go now?”

“Nope. Here, hold her.”

He’s onto her before she can even protest, and she doesn’t want to wake Lila up by talking or moving too much. He helps her adjust the sudden weight in her arms, taking one of her hands to support the baby’s fragile head. Something inside her aches: the memory of cold metal, a bright light blinding her, the final test before graduating. She contains the urge to scream.

“See, it’s easy.”

She nods and stays as still as possible, hoping for him to take Lila away quickly, but her friend (her _only_ friend) just examines her as he walks a few steps backwards. _Don’t just leave her here_ , she wants to protest, but truthful words still aren’t easy for her. She still has to roll her tongue and twist her eyes before she says something for herself, not for a objective or for a mark or for a mission. She’s still learning to be Natasha.

“Maybe one day you’ll get to do this with your own,” he tells her after a while, scratching lazily his cheek.

She chuckles humorlessly. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you—”

“It means I _can’t_.”

She wants to run away, to put down this living reminder of the things she had to sacrifice to be who she is now, but most of all, she wants to feel worthy of this vote of confidence. She wants to feel worthy of holding a baby, but she’s still stained, her hands still reek of blood and the smell of gunpowder clings to every single piece of clothes she owns. As if reading her mind, Lila fusses in her arms, moving erratically as she starts to cry.

“Still, there’s more than one way to have children.” He takes his daughter from her, resting her small form against his shoulder, and she immediately misses her weight. She has done well this days, her handcuffs have been locked in her drawer from months; it’d be a pity to ruin all her progress for something as insignificant as this.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Would you want to?” he calls before she can leave the cabin, get some fresh air from the woods outside. Why does it matter? Why does he think someone like her may be remotely interested in children? And how, _how_ does he know?

“I can’t, and that’s it. Just leave it like that.”

Thinking about the things she’ll never be able to have is useless, a mere display of weakness and childishness. She is who she is, and that knowledge is as solid as the bones in her body, as permanent as her hard-won muscles and scars. Nothing, not even a miracle, can change that.

_(shards of glass)_

“You don’t get it.”

“You’re absolutely right, I don’t get it. Why don’t you—?”

“ _No_ , okay?”

He doesn’t contradict her out of pity, and that upsets her even more. Natasha adjust the handcuffs until she’s certain they won’t slip out of their place, and she also checks so they aren’t too tight, but Tony does it all over again, as if by willpower they will enlarge, or maybe disappear altogether.

“Just leave it”

He makes a curt gesture that shakes the bedframe, a clinking that brings forward a memory in her mind. For a moment, just for a second, she hates him. Tony turns off the light and lay besides her, adjusting the blankets over them. She settles on her side; she can’t sleep on her back or stomach anymore, and that makes the handcuffs jingle again. She can almost feel his hostility.

“I have to,” she whispers after a moment of silence; she’s decided not to move to avoid making them clink, because they are going to collapse if they keep on like that, fighting about the same thing over and over. He growls, reaching for her.

“No, you don’t have to.”

“See, you don’t—”

Tony grunts, the bed sinks with his movement. The handcuffs jingle again.

“We’re not getting anywhere.”

What else can she tell him? There are no words to express what handcuffing herself as she sleeps means to her, there are no words to describe the representation of the weight in her belly and the weight in her mind, and that hurts. She _must_ , she must anchor herself somewhere, because the memories are taking her away and she no longer knows what to do.

“ _I have to,_ ” she whispers, but the anchor isn’t just the handcuffs; Tony’s hand rests on her waist through the night, laying on her side of the bed, warm and rough.

If only that was enough.

( _the thing i never had_ )

“I wouldn’t have imagined it, not from you.”

“Me either, though I feel there’s something vaguely sexist in that.”

She smiles and twirls her drink, watching the ice sink and float.

“I guess there’s a difference.”

Pepper and Maria watch each other, a gesture of complicity that would terrify anyone with enough common sense; the amount of power between those two women is tremendous, not even Natasha is capable of matching their ability in bureaucracy. However, she has known them for a while, and she understand what they’re implying.

“Are you gonna tell us?” Maria asks, leaning her chair backwards. “Or will we have to decipher that too?”

Natasha raises her eyes to the sky, touching her bottom lip.

“There’s a difference between 'want' and 'can'.”

“Okay, we’re almost there…”

“Knowing that I wasn’t able to have children eliminated any possibility. I couldn’t think about what I could never have, like freedom, or humanity, or I would’ve ended like Svetlana. But I managed to get out, I managed to do good things, and now I have the choice, yes?”

She knows they don’t get it, she can’t even explain it correctly, but they still nod politely.

“I’m afraid to ask,” says Pepper, cleaning her immaculate nails with her napkin, watching her with a slight smile. “But what happened to Svetlana?”

She just raises an eyebrow, letting their minds create a horrible, bloody scene; it’s always better to let them imagine than to tell the truth. Her wrist itches; she’s been sleeping chained for too many nights, but that’s the only way she can stay grounded in the present. Her only concession to Tony is to use one handmade to her wrist so the friction is minimum, and they have red pompoms too.

“ _When I entered this relationship, I was expecting_ me _to be the one handcuffed, y’know?_ ” he had told her when he presented them to her, grabbing her wrist to try them on.

“ _Kinky_.”

But she hadn’t completely explained it to him. She doesn’t know how to arrange the words; her English fails her when it comes to describe something so… so Red Room.

 _Peggy Carter would’ve understood,_ she thinks, grabbing the piece of cake Maria gives her. Natasha probably disappeared from her damaged memory long before her death, but Carter was the only person she met that faced a Black Widow and survived, and one of the originals too, from the first generation.

“ _Her name was Dottie_.” Back then Natasha had just entered SHIELD and she was locked in a cell, only going out to complete missions. Clint had given her a chocolate bar, just one, and since then she hoarded sweets under her pillow, like a little girl.

“ _Unlikely_.”

“ _Well, I_ met _her as Dottie Underwood._ ” She’d raised her chin towards the handcuffs hanging from the metallic bars behind her bed, eyes hooded and mouth quirked. “ _And she did the same thing_.”

 _She knew what it meant_ , Natasha thinks, but that is no comfort. No one should know what it means to chain yourself every night to sleep in peace. And Peggy Carter is already dead, just like her sisters from the Bolshoi, and only she remains. She and her baby.

“I was thinking about inviting someone to our meetings,” says Pepper, and it’s only then that she notices she's been silent for too long, both women are examining her carefully. What had they been talking about? “Her name is Hope Van Dyne.”

A moment of silence.

“Ah, Pym Industries, that explosion in San Francisco,” Maria nods, averting her eyes from Natasha. Svetlana, her broken and destroyed body tied to a training pole, _start_. “Do you think she can help us fix this mess?”

Pepper shrugs and stands up, falling back into her executive mode; her eyes dim, her mouth frowns and somehow even her clothes are straightened by sheer self-control. Only like that can a woman be taken seriously in the world of business; no one knows it better than Pepper Potts. Maria stands up too, but Natasha decides to stay seated; her feet have already started to swell, and Svetlana’s memories have left her alarmed. She doesn’t know why she mentioned her in the first place.

“And, Nat?” Maria tells her after saying goodbye, smiling at her with a mischievousness she rarely allows herself to show. “I call dibs on being the godmother.”

“What? No! Wait a second,” Pepper protests, and a piece of her CEO mask crumbles, just for a moment. “We have to do this democratically—”

“I asked first.”

Natasha just hides her smile behind her glass and shuffles her feet, circling the red marks on her wrist back and forth, over and over again.

( _belonging_ )

She can’t remember the last time she felt this nervous, the last time her stomach bubbled and her mind automatically looked for hints, for any clue on her interlocutor to make it easier. She hasn’t felt this need to lie in a long time.

“You okay?” he asks, tilting his head slightly. Her feet, pale and deformed after years of ballet, are on his legs, and the hand tracing circles on her skin makes her even more nervous; she swallows for a moment, watches the roof. Why is she feeling like this? What's the problem?

“Yeah, I just…” The words she planned beforehand trip in her mouth, mixing languages and concepts until she closes her eyes and sighs. She never expected this to be so difficult.

“Nat?”

“I have ideas. For names.” There, that’s all. It’s nothing groundbreaking, not like telling him she loved him for the first time or acknowledging she was pregnant out loud. Still, she doesn’t open her eyes and she doesn’t relax her body until his hand finds hers and squeezes.

“Yes?”

“I mean. Not specifically, just like. Russians.” Never has her voice rushed like this, never has her face felt this hot. It’s a first for her; with Tony everything is a first, and there’s no guidebook, no rules forged with fire decades ago in her body and mind. At any given moment the floor may give under her feet and she’ll fall, she’ll mess up and ruin everything and show him how damaged she truly was, it’s only a matter of time.

“That’s great!” His bright voice opens her eyes automatically, confusion marring her face. His dark eyes are shining and he looks happy, genuinely happy, and suddenly she doesn’t know why she felt so bad in the first place.

“I’m not sure, but. It’d be nice, I’d like it.”

“I like the idea too! Let’s name them Vyacheslav, or Oksana! No, _Vladimir_! Vladimir Anthony.”

She laughs as she shakes her head, squeezing his hand in return.

“It’s stupid, but I want to. I’d like a Russian name and a patronymic, even if Russia doesn’t mean that much to me anymore…”

“It’s not stupid,” he says earnestly, leaning forward to cradle the back of her head, pulling her close. “You know that’s not true.”

It’s hard, really hard to fight all the ideas and concepts flying around in her mind. She stopped being a good Soviet girl a long time ago, she has even lived more in America than in the Soviet Union, and yet her past is still a thorn in her side, a piece of glass that is bleeding her slowly, whether she wants to acknowledge it or not. She still thinks in Russian after all this time, she still loves potatoes over any other food and lets snow in winter burn her cheeks and hoards sweets in the cupboard of their house as she did when she was fifteen.

She is so many things, and none of them at the same time. It's exhausting, shattering, and now with this kid…

“Middle name: Antonovich,” Tony says, sinking his fingers in her shoulder, bringing her back to reality, to the present. “Why don’t we use your name? _Natalievich_?”

“That’s not usually done,” she replies before she even considers the idea. There are things linked irrevocably in her mind, chains too strong to break, and old customs are one of the deepest roots in every person’s being, even hers. Even after fighting so hard, even after everything. _So fucked up_ … “Natalia Alianovna, Ivan Vladimirovich. It’s just the way it is.”

“Fuck that,” he snorts, but she can already feel him relenting, leaning backwards and dragging her with him. “Do you have any particular name, or are we just opening a Dostoyevsky book and picking randomly?”

“Rodion,” she laughs, digging her fingers in his side and burying her face against his shoulder. Her stomach is barely round, the weight hasn’t started pulling her down yet, and for now it’s okay. Even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing, even if her mind is becoming is becoming increasingly erratic and fragmented, it’s okay.

They’ll make it so.

( _remains_ )

“This sounded so good in theory…”

“One would think mother nature or evolution or whatever would’ve made this easier.”

“If I die in childbirth, I’ll haunt you forever.”

“Me? Why me? Go and haunt Dr. Cho! She’s the geneticist!”

Natasha leans backwards, breathing deeply, looking at the roof with half-closed eyes. It’s not the pain, it’s not the swollen legs and feet or tiny bladder or the troubles sleeping or constricted lungs or the other hundred effects pregnancy has brought along the kid. She has been deeply uncomfortable before, she has spent months and years in pain, grinding her teeth and ignoring her needs, biological or otherwise, for the sake of a missions. Compared to that, this is nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s simply the fact that, after a decade of trying to learn how to be her, how to be Natasha Romanoff, she doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin anymore. She’s bloated and fat, stuck in a body that no longer belongs to her, and now there’s no going back. She can’t simply train or sleep or eat or chain herself and hope for the world to right itself. _There’s no going back_.

Her eyes itch, but Tony has her hands in a vice-like grip and she doesn’t want to move, not really.

“Why is he kicking so much?” he asks after a moment of silence, lazily stretching over her as he watches the small, moving marks against the skin of her stomach. They still find it mildly disturbing, even after so many months.

“Maybe he wants to get out as much as I want _him_ to get out.”

He barks a laugh, squeezing her wrists playfully as she shifts; she hasn’t been able to sit comfortably since _forever_ , much less lay back and rest in peace. The day is a dark, cloudy one, full of howling winds and a depressing lack of sunlight; Natasha just wants to stretch and groan and doze off like she used to, she wants to be able to move her body as she wishes, but that’s no longer possible, and it won’t be for a while.

Maybe not ever.

“Tony.”

“Hm?”

She rolls her tongue around her mouth, looking at his long eyes and quirked eyebrows, trying to will her thoughts to just… _reach_ him, just like that, without her having to actually vocalize it. She doesn’t want to say it, she doesn’t even want to think about it, and something in her face must’ve given her away, something in the darkness under her eyes or the curve of her mouth. He shifts and stares at her closely.

“You know I can’t read minds. Not yet, anyway.”

She knows it, of course they’re not telepaths, but she wishes it was as simply as that, as if moving her brow could communicate a dozen words instantly, without making any effort. She wishes things could flow between them, _just like that_ , instead of exploding and shifting and evolving, filling and emptying her at the same time.

She’s just tired.

“I don’t recognize myself anymore,” she says, partly to see his reaction, partly because she just doesn’t care anymore. He has always been cleverer than she gave him credit for, much more perceptive and intuitive, and whatever he thinks about this, he hides it well. His only reaction is a slight movement in his eyes, a shift in his broad shoulders. The judgement she expected isn’t there.

“Why?”

She shrugs, pulling back some strands of hair from her face. “I’m no longer me.”

“Of course you’re you. What do you mean?”

What is she now? Is she Natalia, Natasha, Nat, the Black Widow? So many lies, so many swings in her behavior and smiles and tilts of her body. Her thighs are huge, her torso and breasts too, she hasn’t trained in months. Before Natalia and Natasha and Nat and the Black Widow came the twenty-eight girls in the Bolshoi; before humanity came utility.

 _Truth is a matter of circumstance; it’s not all things to all people all the time. Neither am I._ That's what she told Steve a long time ago, gears shifting in her mind as half her life crumbled to the ground, always using her surroundings to her advantage, her body, her assets. Now she has nothing of those, she can’t turn to her beauty or her strength or her acrobatic skills. What is she, if not all those things? Before humanity came utility. Without utility…

“Nat. Talk to me.”

He crawls forward, letting her hands go as he links her limbs with his, trapping her and pressing his considerable weight against her. It’s as good as her handcuffs, bringing her to the present and forcing her to _focus,_ to stop her dangerous, often unhealthy train of thought.

“ _Nat_.”

She shifts her arms and slips her hand inside his shirt, cold fingers tracing an icy path on his back. He flinches, wiggling with a short laugh.

“Ouch! Ah, _stop_ _it_ , woman.”

“It was always cold,” she says, smiling against his shoulder. Something is coming back, a memory probably implanted, perfectly calculated by long dead tutors. “If you're afraid of wolves, don't go to the woods.”

It’s an old proverb, something people said for as long as she could remember when she lived in Russia, but everything vanishes when her insides tremble. Natasha inhales sharply as tiny feet smash one of her ribs, _hard_ , and suddenly her identity crisis seems small, insignificant, compared to this. The biggest anchor of them all, beyond handcuffs and Tony and Russia, is the human she has inside, the thing that takes her breath away with every move, heartbeat, and ultrasound, and who often reminds her of his existence. A true, honest-to-god miracle.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she mumbles as Tony’s body warm her hands, groaning as her bladder protest.

“It does for me.”

She stands up with his help, paddling to the bathroom like an oversized duck, grasping one of his wrists almost instinctively as they enter the bathroom. “Will you wait? I’ll tell you, I promise I will. I just need time.”

“Of course I will. For a hundred years if I ha—”

“Ugh, shut up, you’re so corny.”

He smiles against her hair and lets her go.

( _roman; after_ )

“Come here.”

His eyes are weary and there are new lines around his mouth and eyes, he looks old and ugly, but he’s here after all this time. He’s here, after everything that happened.

“Nat.”

“Come here, you moron.”

He walks slowly, glancing at the sleeping form of Tony on the chair next to her bed, breathing deeply as he snuggles against the blanket she put over him. The resentful glare that darkens his eyes makes her want to scream at him, shake some sense into his stupid brain, but she doesn’t want to fight, not now. She’s way too tired for it.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I.” She adjusts her arms to hold her son more comfortably, making sure not to wake him and his powerful lungs up. He has already pierced everyone’s eardrum with his cries, and calming him down hadn’t been easy. “Here, look.”

There’s a strange expression in his face as he examines her son, something her tired mind can’t decipher. He looks even worse up close, ragged and tired and tanned, and his face doesn’t soften as he watches him, the muscles of his neck and jaw remain clenched.

“Sorry, but Clinton is such an ugly name,” she says, just to see his reaction. “We named him Roman. Roman Antonovich.”

“Roman,” he repeats quietly, reaching to touch one side of his white blanket gently. “Nat, what were you thinkin’?”

“The same thing as you.”

He looks at her for a moment, mouth twisting into something close to regret, and she understands. Whatever happened in Germany, whatever he did or said, it’s beyond their friendship; their bond won’t break for something like that. He once lowered his gun instead of shooting her in the eye and offered his hand, gave her the chance to truly live as a human being, not a weapon or a femme fatale or an assassin. For that, she can forgive him almost anything.

“I don’t approve,” Clint eventually says, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t care.”

“You deserve better.”

“This isn’t about deserving,” she says softly, leaning back with a sigh. “This is about choices, you know that better than anyone. I chose this, _me_. I chose him and I chose this.”

Clint groans, looking like a shabby father reluctantly accepting his daughter’s boyfriend, and the thought makes her smile. Now that he’s here, now that Roman is in her arms and everyone came to visit them, from Pepper to Lila and Hope Van Dyne and Peter in the middle, things are as real as they get. Her body is still swollen and her stomach is distended, there are residues between her legs she doesn’t even want to think about and _everything_ hurts, but Tony’s head is resting next to them to be as close as he can, Roman is heavy and warm between his blankets and Clint is here. For now, just in this small snapshot of her life, it is enough.

“If you promise to be nice to Tony, I’ll even let you be his godfather, after Rhodey.”

“Wait, what? I’m automatically his godfather, I thought that was obvious.”

“Not since you say those horrible things to Tony. Real shitty of you.”

“Shit, okay, I’m sorry.”

“Not to me, to Tony, you idiot.”

Roman moves and fusses, waving his tiny arms as he slowly wakes up from slumber, and Tony’s hand squeezes her hip. She knew he was awake from the very beginning, but Clint definitely wouldn’t have said those things if he’d known. He’s stubborn like that.

“Now get out, I have to breastfeed,” she shoos him, adjusting the wailing kid with one arm as Clint stands up like a spring. “Go and bother someone else.”

He smiles before he goes, leaving a trail of regret and choices and pain in his wake. Once, a long time ago, he was all she had. Once, she only had her handcuffs, the crimson of her own blood and Clint’s sandy hair to keep her grounded. Once, that was all she was.

“Here, gimme,” Tony says as he stretches, yawning widely. Roman whimpers as she passes him to Tony’s waiting arms, and her shoulders pop when she rolls them tentatively. Everything is different; her insides has adjusted to give this new life a home, but now she sees a bit of herself in her new stretch marks, in the thickness of her tights and the light in her eyes. Her sagging skin will tighten again, eventually; the bulge of her stomach will flatten and the marks around her wrist will fade. Her entire being has changed, but there's an enormous difference between choosing and being forced to, and this, this partnership and this child and this life, is all hers. This, she chose.

**Author's Note:**

> Being physically unable to have children is not the same as willingly choosing not to have children, which is also not the same as being a 'monster'. Fuck Joss Whedon 2k20.


End file.
